User talk:JakeAlberta
Welcome
[edit]Hello JakeAlberta and welcome to Wikipedia! We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your contributions, such as the ones to Harvey Cenaiko, do not conform to our policies. For more information on this, see Wikipedia's policies on vandalism and limits on acceptable additions. If you'd like to experiment with the wiki's syntax, please do so in the sandbox (but beware that the contents of the sandbox are deleted frequently) rather than in articles.
If you still have questions, there is a new contributors' help page, or you can to ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia.
I hope you enjoy editing and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! Drmies (talk) 23:29, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. I've seen your edits to Harvey Cenaiko. I see that, in your most recent edit summary, you have expressed your view of why the material you seek to add should be included in the article. However, the content of Wikipedia articles is determined primarily by what reliable, secondary sources say about a subject, since Wikipedia, like most real encyclopaedias, is a tertiary source; this is true of all subjects that Wikipedia covers, but is especially important when including contentious information about living people—see WP:BLPPRIMARY. The edit you included was sourced entirely to a primary source. If this material has been covered in secondary sources, some variant of it may be suitable for inclusion in the article (though the formatting would still have to be fixed, and we would have to be very careful to comply with Wikipedia's policies about putting undue weight on one aspect of a subject...this one incident obviously shouldn't comprise the majority of the article), but if it is only sourcable by primary sources, it is not. I hope that clarifies things, and feel free to ask if you have any questions. Again, welcome to Wikipedia. Steve Smith (talk) 23:35, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
- Regarding your message here, the short answer is that you are arguing that Wikipedia should be something other than what it is. You are certainly welcome to believe that, but your believing it is unlikely to get you anywhere.
- Having said that, I will respond to some of your specific points:
- "Secondary sources rely on the author's view of the primary sources." Undoubtedly. But what you were trying to do at Harvey Cenaiko was to turn that article itself into a secondary source (i.e. a source that relies directly on primary sources), which would then rely on the author's (your) view of the primary sources. For example, your view of the primary source was apparently that the ethics commissioner investigation is a significant and important part of the subject of Harvey Cenaiko. Some people might agree, and some people might not. Relying on secondary sources (not just any secondary sources, but high quality reliable secondary sources independent of their subject matter) allows us to rely on the views of experts in the relevant field. If their are multiple such experts with conflicting views, then the views of each are to be represented in proportion to their prominence in the secondary sources. Your desire to write Wikipedia articles directly from primary sources does not cure the problem of reliance on authors' views—rather, it substitutes the views of Wikipedia editors (who are, by and large, nobodies) with the views of experts in the field.
- "Secondary sources can be wrong" (I'm paraphrasing this one). This is also true, and unfortunate. In theory, by relying on the kinds of high quality secondary sources I mentioned above, we can minimize this problem, since such sources should be wrong less often. But there is no doubt that even such secondary sources are periodically wrong. If a primary source establishes, unambiguously, that a particular secondary source is wrong, then the wrong information should be removed from the article, notwithstanding that it is sourced to a theoretically reliable secondary source (see, for example, 1937 Social Credit backbenchers' revolt#Social Credit Board and commission, in which different secondary sources give different names for the Board's first members, but where we were able to resolve that discrepancy by resort to a primary source). But if the secondary source simply gives an interpretation to the primary source that is arguably wrong, Wikipedia is not here to present the opposing interpretation. If the opposing interpretation is a viable one on a subject of importance, then presumably at some point a reliable secondary source will offer that interpretation, and Wikipedia will cover it.
- "Living people rarely have any secondary sources". This is false. But if it is true of a particular living person, then that person should not have a Wikipedia article, per Wikipedia's notability guidelines, which state that a subject is notable enough for a Wikipedia article only if it "has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject".
- Anyway, Wikipedia's reliance on secondary sources, especially for articles about living people, is really not up for debate, but I hope the above assists you in understanding why things are the way they are here (i.e. far from perfect, but better than they would be if we constructed articles from primary sources). Steve Smith (talk) 00:13, 27 October 2019 (UTC)